That the modern sense of "literature" has not been in the Western world for long should not be taken to mean that before the nineteenth century the word itself had not been around nor that there was no collective term for identifying the peculiar "from of language" of writings that we would now consider literary. Yet a change did occur: something happened in the late eighteenth century to the way works of art were valued. No longer considered rhetorical or didactic instruments, they became prized as autonomous creations. In northrop freye's